Learning Spring Boot – 2nd Edition Rewrite is complete

I have finished updating every chapter of this book to the Reactor-based paradigm. And boy did it take a lot!

In case you missed it, when I embarked upon writing this book for Packt Publishing, I decided to start from scratch. The previous edition, as much as I enjoyed it, wasn’t bold enough. This time, I wanted to build an application chapter by chapter, and make it as real as possible.

So I dug into a demo app I had used at several conferences called Spring-a-Gram. That app started from my desire to snap a picture of the audience and upload it to the website, LIVE. Great eye candy, right? Along the way, I learned lots of aspects of the Spring portfolio that this app could leverage.

And when faced with the prospect of writing a new title on Spring Boot, I picked up and ran with that app. Only this time, EVERYTHING would be done asynchronously and without blocking, i.e. with Reactor, Pivotal’s implementation of the Reactive Streams spec.

So this book is stocked with asynchronous web, data access, AMQP messaging, WebSockets, microservices, security, metrics, developer tools, and production tips. A solid cross section of what developers need to build apps.

The trick with this lauded goal is that when I started writing about 15 months ago, there was no Spring Boot 2.0. Spring WebFlux was being scratched out in an experimental repository. Spring Boot WebFlux starters appeared later in a different repository.

Talk about taking on a risk!

So I started writing the manuscript using Boot 1.4 and servlets, with plans to rewrite everything once the Reactor bits were available. That has been a LOT of effort, but worth it.

Because I’m quite proud of being able to show people how to build apps rooted in Spring, the de facto Java toolkit for application development, but now sitting atop Project Reactor, the bedrock of Reactive Streams apps.

Until yesterday, we were focusing on Spring Boot 2.0.0.M4 as the release target, but decided to wait for 2.0.0.M5 coming in a couple weeks, with plans to polish, revise, and release around the second week of October.

Hopefully we can hold onto that release date! There appears to be high demand for what will be the first book on Spring WebFlux as well as Project Reactor to hit the markets.

I’m excited to get this book into everyone’s hands and watch as people began to write scalable apps with Reactor on top of the Spring portfolio.